Regarding resource files, you can have more than one string per file – consider ordinary java properties files, which are easy enough to work with (and powerful, when the string values contained therein are filled with $... placeholders for format calls). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.properties

As of Clojure 1.5, we should consider EDN compatibility when proposing an extension to the Clojure reader. See http://edn-format.org. Also, note that Clojure 1.5 added clojure.edn/read and read-string. As a practical matter, any new string reader syntax should probably be part of EDN as well as Clojure.